August 13th, 2018: Meanwhile, in strategy games...

By Joe Robinson13 Aug 20180

It's been a fairly interesting week - nothing too crazy, but enough has dropped to keep our strategy bar topped up. Last week was awash with news and few releases - we covered what we could at the time, but here's a round-up of everything we missed.

Meanwhile, in strategy games...

EU4 Dharma Release Date

This was announced literally as I was inputting this into the CMS, so it's a short & sweet entry: Those looking forward to the upcoming Europa Universalis 4 expansion Dharma won't have too much longer to wait. The Indian Subcontinent & Trade focused expansion will be launching on September 6th, 2018.

Discord to launch game store

In case you missed this bombshell from last week, Discord – the gamer chat/communication app – has decided to launch its own game store within Discord itself. The soft-launch was rolled out last week to a selection of users from Canada and will sport two main offerings: A direct purchase storefront, and then they will also trail adding in games as a perk for Nitro subscription members.

In terms of purchase, TechCrunch is reporting 11 games were added on day one of the beta, including, Intro the Breach, Frostpunk & Banner Saga 3.

For the subscription test it’s mainly older games. Apart from Kingdom: New Lands, there isn’t really anything we’d cover here at Strategy Gamer although they are still some great games on offer (Darksiders, System Shock etc…)

Last but not least, Discord is going to create a launcher as well, so you can launch your games via the app itself.

Bad North Goes Discord

In related news, micro-strategy game Bad North also announced last week that their PC debut will be made via Discord. There’s going to be a “First on Discord” line-up when the storefront launches in earnest, and Bad North is signed up to be one of those games. They’re still coming to Steam and GOG, but it will be sometime after the Discord launch. We know the Pocket Tactics crowd are eager to learn about the iOS/Android versions.

Asmodee’s Digital Board Game Line-up

Asmodee Digital are working on a lot of board games. Like, seriously, they must be responsible for nearly 90% of 2018’s output in terms of digital ports. With that many games in the works, it can be hard to keep track of what’s coming out when. Thankfully the company released an update on that off the back of GenCon:

Releasing Q3, 2018:

Onitama

Scythe (Already in Early Access)

Terraforming Mars

Pandemic (Steam version)

Bang!

Releasing Q4, 2018:

Ticket to Ride (PS4/Playlink)

The Lord of the Rings: Living Card Game

Gloom

Five Tribes

2019 Releases:

Mansions of Madness: Mother’s Embrace (adaption, not a direct port)

Steve Jackson’s Munchkin (slipped from 2018)

Gloomhaven

New Total War: Three Kingdoms Trailer

I generally don’t like creating news items just around a trailer, but the latest release for the upcoming Total War: Three Kingdoms proved fairly illustrative.

While the core is a micro-narrative around Sun Jian bitching about the state of affairs, the video itself highlights some interesting details as to the campaign map, how it will look, how the various game elements are represented… it’s all in engine and looking pretty sweet.

Notable Dev Diaries

Quite a few interesting upcoming games continue to put out the dev diaries:

Aggressors: Ancient Rome has put out its eight diary, which looks at Trade Routes. The designer has gone with a fairly intricate approach, and it’s not easy to summarise here, but you can read the whole thing in full if you’re interested.

Battlestar Galactica Deadlock hasn’t had a diary in a while, but the latest update is talking about how they’re overhauling the ‘Defend’ command on squadrons. The diary goes into a lot of detail regarding how it’s supposed to work and the solutions they’re implementing, and you can give it a read here.

Last but not least, another Age of Wonders: Planetfall diary moves away from combat to look at the world map, and specifically goes over how Exploration works in the game. The whole premise is that you’re survivors of the apocalypse landing on unknown worlds hoping to call them home – there will be a lot of unknowns to explore.